May

I am an obsessive follower of politics. With 189 days left until the US presidential election, I'm in full-on obsessive poll-watching mode.
As usual, you should ignore national polls. The important point is the electoral college. You can see a projected electoral map for 2012, and you can also create your own. My current pessimistic prediction has Barack Obama winning by just 3 electoral votes, hinging on a win in Virginia.
Virginia is one of the four battleground states that are going to matter in this election. The full set, and their current polls, are:
Virginia - best bet
Ohio - a possible win
North Carolina - an unlikely win
Florida - no chance
Obama won all four in 2008 but this is pretty much guaranteed not to happen this year.
While national polls are almost useless, it is worth keeping an eye on these three:
Obama's job approval: is he doing a good job? This has been negative for most of Obama's presidency, which is not great but not unusual either.
Obama's favorability: do you like him?...

In retrospect, it seems obvious that we were conducting our searches for extraterrestrial life in completely the wrong way, and even then half-heartedly. But then, so many things are clear now that once seemed impossibly mysterious.
Consider the contradictions inherent to our pre-contact thinking. Simultaneously, we marveled at the uniqueness of our planet, and searched for ones just like it. Earth has far too much water for a world so close to the sun -- our best guess was that it bad been deposited by comets. This thin envelope of water was just deep enough to give us oceans, just shallow enough to leave us with continents, while every other planet we could see was either an arid dust ball or else crushed under hundreds of miles of ice.
Our home planet has a moon nearly a quarter the size of the planet itself, a cosmic arrangement we could see nowhere else. This anomaly interacted with the first and gave us tides, repeatedly washing the borders of the continents with organic matter until finally some of...